moreutils

moreutils is a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago.

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moreutils project is a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago.

It includs utilities to get network interface information, to mark standard input with time stamps, to check whether a data stream is UTF-8, to combine the lines in two files using boolean operations, to soak up standard input and write to a file, to edit a directory in your text editor, to insert a text editor into a pipe, and to tee standard input to pipes.

Probably the most general purpose tool in moreutils so far is sponge(1), which lets you do things like this:

% sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd

There are lots more listed in the README, and I'm always interested to add more to the collection, as long as they're suitably general-purpose.

Tools under consideration

Here are some that are under consideration but have not yet been included, I also welcome feedback on which of these to include.

mime

determines the mime type of a file using the gnome mine database(More useful than file(1) in many cases but would add a lot of gnome libraries to the package's dependency chain.)

z

makes another program understand compressed filesex: z zxgv file.bmp.gz(Dare I take the "z" name?)

tmp

puts stdin into a temp file and passes it to the specified programex: zcat file.bmp.gz | tmp zxgv

add

adds up numbers from stdin

todist

inputs a list of numbers and outputs their distribution, a value and how many time it occurs in the input http://baruch.ev-en.org/files/todist(Not a general enough unix tool, probably?)

tostats

inputs a list of numbers and outputs some statistics about the numbers: average, stddev, min, max, mid point http://baruch.ev-en.org/files/tostats